OSD 356: Time-to-effective-resistance

A better metric to measure your safety.

Back in October, Hoffnung wrote this piece:

Myth Of The Rapid-Fire Mass Shooter?

And it proved prescient in light of the mass murder at Bondi Beach on Sunday:

One of the gun restrictionist responses to mass shootings has been to limit the size of magazines for magazine-fed firearms, usually to either 10 or 15 rounds and sometimes less, based on the idea that this will slow down the shooting or allow unarmed defenders to rush a mass shooter while they reload. Meanwhile, gun rights supporters argue that reloading typical detachable-magazine firearms is fast enough that it is unlikely to matter much in an attack on helpless victims. However, this still accepts the implied assumption, that mass shooters are shooting into a crowd and the limiting factor on how many people they can kill is the ability to sustain a high rate of fire for the short term.

I think that for most mass shootings, there is reason to think that this may not be the case after all. There are cases where it is definitely true, such as the Vegas shooting where the shooter sprayed rapid fire into a huge crowd from an elevated and concealed position (and which has been ever after been the subject of conspiracy theories). It also is likely true for a handful of other mass shootings involving attacks on extremely crowded areas like nightclubs. These attacks rank among the deadlier mass shootings. However, only a minority of rampage shootings follow this pattern. More commonly, however, mass shooters have attacked places like schools, workplaces, or storefronts where there are at most two dozen victims exposed to them at once. They are then rapidly deprived of targets as people flee.

Combine that with the observation from Kostos Moros that the Bondi Beach shooting — perpetrated with a straight-pull bolt-action rifle and two shotguns — killed more people than most mass shootings in the US, where guns with a higher rate of fire are much more readily available. He summed it up as, “The critical factor is not the lethality of the firearm, but the helplessness of the victims and the amount of time before an armed response.”

The consistent pattern with mass shootings is that they tend to end as soon or as late as the perpetrators meet effective resistance. Note, for example, how after being disarmed by a heroic bystander, one of the attackers at Bondi Beach simply stumbles around bewildered for a while. He was also disarmed by two other bystanders at the very beginning of the attack, though in that instance he sadly managed to get another gun and kill the brave couple who had disarmed him. He got lucky that one time in being able to overpower someone smaller and older than him, and he didn’t get lucky a second time.

The people who commit these kinds of mass murders tend, fortunately, to be morons. “Speed, surprise, and violence of action” cuts both ways. They rely on it to get the jump on innocent people, but they are ill-equipped to be on the receiving end.

The Australian Financial Review did a detailed analysis of bystander video and found that the killers fired 83 shots. Police fired about 20 shots of their own, and the vast majority of the victims appear to have been killed before police started firing and before the first killer was disarmed. Unfortunately, that took about eight minutes.

Time-to-effective-resistance is a useful metric here. “Unarmed bystander running up and grabbing the gun” is a form of resistance, and it’s incredibly heroic. But it’s also incredibly dangerous, with many examples of the people attempting it simply winding up killed in the process without putting a stop to the attack (e.g. the example above or Maine 2023). Its effectiveness is uncertain and very situational.

“Shoot the attacker with a gun of your own” is pretty effective resistance. It’s very rare for a mass shooter to engage in a protracted gun battle. They tend to get hit or to do themselves in almost immediately once bullets start coming back at them.

It’s not that hard to imagine a society where time-to-effective-resistance is <10 seconds in most public settings. That might sound completely unachievable. To some, it might sound dystopian, like some kind of Neo-Western fever dream.

But it turns out that it’s both surprisingly achievable and innocuous. So much so that it has actually already been achieved in large parts of the US, and nobody even noticed. It’s just a factual description of … most large gatherings anywhere that concealed carry is common.

If you define a public setting as, say, any place with more than ten adults, then if 10% of adults carry, you’d expect most public settings to have at least one person with a gun. The odds would be 65% for a gathering of exactly ten adults, and they would increase with the size of the group. The bigger the group, the more likely that time-to-effective-resistance is nearly instant.

The exact math differs, of course, based on how many people carry, and that in turn depends on where you are, what the culture is like, and so on. But the point is that in any society where regular people carry at least occasionally, then in a sufficiently large group, the odds of there being at least one defensive gun trend towards 100%.

This has shades of the tired “all the shootings are in gun free zones” talking point, but it’s more than that. The Bondi Beach shooting demonstrates that rate of fire doesn’t really matter. So laws restricting guns’ capabilities don’t really matter. Occasional mass murderers will use the tools that are available to plan an attack that allows them to kill a lot of people. The only thing that determines whether they become mass murderers or stay would-be mass murderers is how quickly someone stops them.

It’s doable to set up an entire country to be able to stop any such people within seconds. It’s just a math problem.

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This week’s links

Shooting through 1/4” steel with a 9mm

5mm of sabot + 4mm of tungsten kinetic penetrator = 9mm

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